Toshiba beats Apple to the tablet prize

This year's IFA tech trade fair has been long on incremental product upgrades and painfully short on breakthrough technology.

Toshiba has come closest, delivering a pleasant surprise with the Journe Touch – a "mobile internet device" that sits somewhere between a netbook, web-enabled phone and portable media player. In fact, this device delivers much of what we are expecting from Apple.

It has a seven-inch touchscreen (800 by 480 pixels), HDMI connectivity via an optional cradle and a Windows interface with a browser.

Graeme Simons, Toshiba's business manager, says the driving principle behind the device is portable access to media and online content, although the device also has a large enough screen to use at home without squinting when you can't be bothered to power up your laptop.

You get support for WMA and MP3 audio files, which you can listen to for seven hours on one battery charge, and the device's MPEG 4/H.264 allows HD movie viewing (though this takes the battery life down to two hours). Simons notes that the Journe Touch is not designed to be used as an eBook as this would drain the power too quickly to be practical.

What is most interesting about this device, though, is the deals that Toshiba has already signed with various content providers. Although Simons emphasised that the device is only 90 per cent ready, a homescreen with an array of widgets suggests that Toshiba may have taken Apple's app idea and run with it. You've got YouTube, Picasa, the video-on-demand service Acetrax, Flickr and Windows Live Messenger on there already, as well as Facebook and the Weather Channel, although the latter two are not mentioned in the Toshiba press release.

Simons hinted that Toshiba has been talking to the BBC about iPlayer content, but he said there's work yet to be done as "different content providers have different specifications to reach to show their content."

He also said that the company will use software updates to keep adding new content, which raises the prospect of a Journe Touch app store, much like the one Apple has for the iPhone, iPod Touch and soon, presumably, the Tablet – a device it probably won't have announced by the time the Journe Touch reaches UK shops.